Get Shown the Light: Improvisation and Transcendence in the Music of the Grateful Dead

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Get Shown the Light: Improvisation and Transcendence in the Music of the Grateful Dead

by Michael Kaler

Duke University Press, 2023

ISBNs

Cloth: 978-1-4780-2034-9

Paper: 978-1-4780-2497-2

eISBN: 978-1-4780-9432-6 (OA)

eISBN: 978-1-4780-2732-4 (standard)

About the Book

Of all the musical developments of rock in the 1960s, one in particular fundamentally changed the music’s structure and listening experience: the incorporation of extended improvisation into live performances. While many bands—including Cream, Pink Floyd, and the Velvet Underground—stretched out their songs with improvisations, no band was more identified with the practice than the Grateful Dead. In Get Shown the Light Michael Kaler examines how the Dead’s dedication to improvisation stemmed from their belief that playing in this manner enabled them to touch upon transcendence. Drawing on band testimonials and analyses of early recordings, Kaler traces how the Dead developed an approach to playing music that they believed would facilitate their spiritual goals. He focuses on the band’s early years, the significance of their playing Ken Kesey’s Acid Test parties, and their evolving exploration of the myriad musical and spiritual possibilities that extended improvisation afforded. Kaler demonstrates that the Grateful Dead developed a radical new way of playing rock music as a means to unleash the spiritual and transformative potential of their music.

About the Author

Michael Kaler is Associate Professor, teaching stream, at the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy at the University of Toronto Mississauga and author of Flora Tells a Story: The Apocalypse of Paul and Its Contexts.

Reviews

“Michael Kaler demonstrates that the pursuit of something esoteric, essential, and religious in nature drove the Grateful Dead’s artistic path. Persuasively arguing that the Dead believed that improvisational music has the power to evoke transcendence and foster collective consciousness, Get Shown the Light makes an important contribution to the growing body of work that interrogates the relationship between music, religiosity, and American culture.”

-- Ariella Werden-Greenfield, coeditor of This Is Your Song Too: Phish and Contemporary Jewish Identity

“Ever since the 1960s, critics, fans, and band members understood that something powerful and unusual was at work when the Grateful Dead took the stage. ‘Every place we play is church’ became the common refrain to explain that elusive ethos, but tracing what that unorthodox spirituality consisted of and how it came to characterize the band’s concerts has challenged observers and inveigled scholars for decades. Michael Kaler brings a musician’s perspective to a religious studies exploration of this seminal topic, showing how Dead shows achieved what both band and fans recognized as something more than the typical concert experience, one that had a distinct and distinctive spiritual quality.”

-- Nicholas G. Meriwether, Haight Street Art Center, San Francisco

"This volume should interest musicologists, theologians, and academics of all sorts, as well as fans who want a better understanding of the Grateful Dead experience and its religious dimensions."
-- Robert G. Weiner Reading Religion

"Though it may not reach the level of epiphany, this rationally engineered clarity on supra-rational musically powered transcendence will reward readers diligent enough to follow the book from beginning to end, and the underlying paradox may well produce delight in its own right as a complement to the intellectual satisfaction at which the book aims."
-- Brent Wood University of Toronto Quarterly